It's a little distressing, how everybody out there EXCEPT the poets are responding to my 'poetry class' posts. Is this because the poets are too busy brooding? Or is it that they consider my choices SO far beyond the pale that they can only feel silent pity for me?
In any case, it's the New Yorker that ran the poem in question today. Some of you will instantly recognize it as a 'Steve poem' - but since the whole purpose of these little tutorials is to broaden that definition, I'm including it anyway:
Memory buries its own,
And of what now forever must be
The longest day of his life
What mostly remained was a blur
Under too bright lights - so he
Could scarcely tell if the things
Sharpest in his mind were
Nothing but fantasies, sewn
Afterwards, out of grief,
And guilt's imaginings.
Yet it seemed memory called up
(After the interminable birth,
As his finger stroked the arm
Of a child who would not last
Even one whole day
And all of its time on earth
Ministered to by vast
Machines that couldn't mend the harm
In a single transcription slip
In reams of DNA)
A look so haunted, so
Haunting, he would not confess
(Not even later, to his wife)
How it stayed with him, on him: the slow
Flicker in a watery eye,
The mute call - through all
The exhausted hopefulness
The condemned come to know
In the end - from animal to animal,
Imploring, Please save my life.
That's called 'Son' and it's by Brad Leithauser, and yes - it's heartbreakingly sad (and about the death of a child to boot). But I also think it's GOOD. And in wondering aloud whether or not it really is, I should stress I'd like to hear also from you genuine versifiers out there.
